Each generation grabs for examples from the past to describe what it’s going through. The Jacobins used the Gracchi. The Bolsheviks measured themselves against Danton and Robespierre. If I had to find an analogy for the mobilisations on the day that the Con Dems ended the phony war it would be Operation Barbarossa. That’s when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the Red Army collapsed and Hitler was eventually defeated after huge battles and great sacrifices.
Osborne made it clear weeks in advance that he wanted to make half a million workers unemployed. He didn’t hide the fact that he wanted to make everyone work longer and earn less. He was pretty upfront about wanting a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. Any way you look at it today was an historic moment. A bunch of millionaire ex-public school boys announced from the mountain tops how much they hate working people and the poor.
So where was the Labour Movement? Buggered if I know. On Tuesday the TUC had a couple of thousand people at a central London rally which got fifteen seconds worth of press coverage. Given that a fair chunk of those present were full time officials you can’t really complain.
Wednesday evening’s march and rally called by the Coalition of Resistance, Camden Trades Council was much bigger and better even though it probably only got about four to five thousand people to march from Holborn to a rally at Downing Street. It had the mood of a bunch of people who were up for a fight and knew it was going to be an important one.
Also on the plus side a lot of students turned up and there were loads of union banners and even a few Labour Party ones. Several of these were not the ones you usually see and talking to people some fessed up to this being their first ever demo. That might account for the feeble response to the attempt to start a chant calling for a general strike. Yet the hard fact is that the far left offered the only response on the streets of London on the day the Con Dems went berserk. Here was the utter failure of the vast majority of the union leaderships and the bulk of the Labour Party manifest. If a few major unions had thrown their weight behind Wednesday’s events they would have changed the political landscape. They didn’t.
Modesty prevented me from giving a TV interview when asked by ITN though they did give comrade Ozlem some airtime to get over the key points of the ecosocialist transitional programme. However the final word goes to George Binette who had a big part in pulling the show together. He finished the day more optimistic than he started and thought he saw the beginnings of a big new radicalisation. I think he’s right.
Liam redux 
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